No more idle plskthxbi!

Things are back on full swing with Fusion right now. I just completed a total overhaul of my video cube grid animation, it now renders about 85% faster and I've set the stage to upgrade it from only 8 videos to 10 videos. They want to use this cube grid animation to do a bi-weekly top-10 countdown.

I addition to this very long cube grid animation, I also have a specialty animation using only one cube of the 5x2 grid which details a special event like a live show or an interview. They also want a nifty side-bar animation that pops in the corner of a live-show or interview detailing the interviewer/interviewee.

In addition to all this, they want templates to make the production go faster. Understandibly so, this is a lot for me to do constantly. The specialty cube video and the pop-in animation shouldn't be a problem creating templates so that they can re-use the same animation with different text. But the cube grid top-10 countdown has proven to be extremely difficult to create a template out of. Way too many layers overlayed on pre-rendered frames, it's going to take way longer to create the template than it will to actually render out all the seperate video animation and composite them together. I don't even know if it will be posible and easy-to-use if I can even create a template, so we'll see how this one goes.

The cube grid is a 5x2 grid of cubes. On one side is the Fusion logo animation, and the other side is a video. All the cubes rotate around to display the video and then one at a time, the cubes pop out of their place and zoom towards the camera. They zoom in towards the camera at the beginning of the video, and then I use After Effects to bring the music video the rest of the way into the screen from the cube. When the video is over, the last few seconds appear on the cube as it animates back down to it's resting spot where it was before and the next cube comes up to introduce the next video. This repeats for all 10 videos. This one long animation is cut up into 10 pieces, each piece showing the final seconds of the last video and introducing the first few seconds of the next video, and in between each animation I use After Effects to show the bulk of the music video. It's a long process, and it takes about 3 hours to get all the cube animations rendered out, plus work in After Effects and that's about 5-6 hours total. The producer at Fusion is really excited about this animation, but is understandibly worried about production times. But if they get the things I need in a timely fashion, then this will go smoothly.

I'm just happy to be doing more now, things were getting a little too idle for a while, and I like to stay busy.